This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What’s the difference between left and right politics in America? How are the perspectives and values different?
Jonathan Haidt answers these questions in his book The Righteous Mind. He discusses the difference between left and right ideologies from the perspective of moral psychology. He argues that liberals and conservatives have different narratives about the country, and he explains why liberals have a hard time understanding conservatives.
Read more to learn about the difference between left and right.
Liberal and Conservative Stories
One way to see the difference between left and right is to consider their narratives. Conservatives and liberals in America have different foundational stories about the country.
Conservatives since the Reagan era argue that America used to be a beacon of liberty, but liberals have attempted to ruin it by creating bureaucracy and tax burdens that stunt growth while also opposing faith and God. They took money from good, hard-working people and gave it to lazy people living on welfare while lionizing evil promiscuity and a “gay lifestyle.”
Liberals argue that there used to be dictatorial, oppressive regimes that governed the world, which virtuous people—through time and effort—overthrew. They then founded democracies and started fighting for equal rights for all, creating laws and government programs that could benefit everyone.
The conservative narrative is the heroic beating back of hordes attempting to overrun their lifestyle and the liberal narrative is the heroic triumph over those more powerful.
The conservative narrative relies on a little bit of the care foundation (from Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory) and a lot of all five of the other moral foundations. The liberal narrative relies on only the care, fairness, and liberty foundations. This is a significant factor in the difference between left and right ideologies.
Conservatives can more easily understand the liberal narrative because all of the foundations that the liberals rely on they rely on as well.
Liberals have a harder time understanding the conservative narrative because they can’t understand the foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. They believe that these foundations are often immoral: Liberals argue loyalty to country leads to exclusion of immigrants and many non-white Americans. Belief in authority is congruous with belief in oppression. And sanctity is a religious argument that often provides the foundation for homophobia.
Blind Spots
Liberals, though, have significant blind spots when it comes to understanding conservatives. Just like liberals, conservatives are interested in creating the best possible society.
Haidt realized this while reading a volume of Conservatism, a compendium of conservative thought. The conservative intellectuals in Conservatism (who Haidt believes are different from the modern Republican Party) argued much of what this book argues: Humans are imperfect and overconfident, and so we create theories of the world and morality based on reason rather than an understanding of history and humans’ intuition.
Conservatives argue that people need outside constraints to behave properly and thrive. Without them, people will cheat, and social capital, or trust, will begin to decline.
One difference between left and right is how they regard and leverage moral capital, or the resources necessary to sustain and grow a moral community. Think about a commune without the religious aspect: Communes that promote self-expression and tolerance more than loyalty might attract more new members, but they would have a harder time surviving than those that live by strict regulations that better suppress selfishness. Conservatives understand the value of moral capital.
Moral capital is a mixed bag. It leads to suppressing selfishness, but it also leads to suppressing dissent. You can often find it in fascist nations or cults.
However, when considering changes to society, always consider how they will change a society’s moral capital. This is a blind spot for the left: It is why communist revolution often ends in despotism and why liberal reforms are often ineffective. Liberalism changes too much too quickly in the goal of bringing about freedom and equal opportunity. Conservatism can better preserve moral capital, but they fail to see the need for changes to our society to move with the times or protect the vulnerable.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Righteous Mind summary :
- Why we all can't get along
- How our divergent moralities evolved
- How we can counter our natural self-righteousness to decrease political divides
